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About This Game

When you, as a young boy, are dropped off to visit your uncle, you notice something’s wrong. First, he’s not there to greet you. Second, there’s the explosion that happened right as you arrived. And third, the house seems to be even weirder than you remembered it. Now, your job is to find—and ultimately rescue—your uncle, by using his newest invention, the Interdimensional Shift Device (or IDS), to switch between dimensions and solve puzzles. That sofa too heavy to move? There’s a dimension for that! Switch to Fluffy Dimension and that sofa is now light as a feather. Need to get up to a high ledge? There’s a dimension for that! Just switch to Anti-Gravity Dimension and things begin to float upward. Need to make things heavier? There’s a dimension for th—well, you get the idea. Switch dimensions in real time, work your way through the crazy complex mansion wings and rescue your uncle!

Q: What do you get if you cross Portal's wacky physics puzzles with a modernized, gorgeously realized Tex Avery-like art style, and add in a mad scientist voiced by John de Lancie ("Q" from Star Trek: The Next Generation)?

A: Well, if any of that description made you perk your ears up and drool, then you probably already own this game. And hey, the great thing is, if you absolutely hate any part of that description, you will probably avoid this. Easy!

It's a great game, and really, really scratches the Portal itch. The animations and artwork in the game are charming, demented and sometimes unspeakably cute. (I love the machines that barf crates! I love them so much!) De Lancie is suitably crazy, but not maliciously so -- he's just very determinedly absent-minded, that's all! The areas are filled with a nice array of collectibles, the game runs smoothly... I can't really find too many things wrong with this.

Well, except one: I'm stupid and haven't been able to finish the game yet. But chances are WILDLY in favor of you being much smarter than I am, and so you have nothing to worry about!

Welp I quit. I really liked this game when it first started, because I really enjoy first person puzzlers, and in a lot of ways this game is a great one, but it also kinda shoots itself in the face. The different "dimensions" (light, heavy, slow, reverse gravity) make for some really great puzzles and there a lot of puzzle chambers that were genuinely fun to solve and exactly what I expected when I purchased this game. These were the puzzle chambers where you had to use the four dimensions to maneuver blocks in the environment to press buttons, trip lasers, avoid lasers, drop a ball into a net, and other types of things. I remember really enjoying a particular puzzle chamber with a bunch of conveyers, and the trick to it was that you had to use reverse gravity to utilize the UNDER side of the conveyers as well as the top side. That was a fun discovery, and it was fun to execute on when I realized it.

But here is where the game is possibly going to ♥♥♥♥ you off and possibly make you quit. It is not ENOUGH in quantum conundrum to just solve the puzzle, because this is not just a puzzle game. The further you get into the game, the more the game becomes about physics, timing, and platforming---and in the most annoying way. We're talking about a situation, for just one example, where you have to position three blocks in such a way that they fall onto three conveyors at the same time, and those conveyors (hopefully) drop them onto a fourth conveyor in a (hopefully) straight line, so that they move into position under a gap where you can use reverse gravity to elevate them into a bridge position across the gap, then quickly use slow-time to hold them in position so you can use them as a series of platforms to jump across. BUT WAIT. The opposite side of the gap is blocked by a door that has to be opened with a button, but there is a 3 second delay between the time you press the button and the time the door opens, and the door will ONLY open if slow time is on at the EXACT MOMENT the door would open. So you have to try and figure out the exact timing to press the button, press reverse gravity, then press slow time. Or is it press reverse gravity, THEN press the button, THEN slow time? How much of a pause do I leave between each one? Who knows? Good look setting up the solution 50 times until you trial-and-error work it out. And then when you finally DO figure out the timing, the game's physics dropped the safes onto the conveyor all sloppy so they're not lined up well, so when you try to execute some crappy first-person-platforming (let's face it: FPS platforming is always kinda crappy) across them, you miss the third safe and have to set it all up AGAIN. And again. And again. This all gets very f***ing tedious and sometimes even feels like there is an element of luck to it (i.e. how the physics works out), which is not a good situation.

Also, the professor or whoever talking to you over the intercom talks way too much, and it's sort of painful to listen to how much he tries to be funny but just isn't really. (Sorry, writers.) And his constant blabbering sort of ruins the atmosphere. For a dramatic improvement to atmosphere and experience, do yourself a favor. OPTIONS -> AUDIO SETTINGS -> DIALOGUE VOLUME -> turn it all the way down to zero to shut him up forever.

At the end of the day, it's a really great puzzle game that could have been a real classic, but its annoying habit of ruining its puzzles with physics that are beyond your control, first-person platforming too demanding for a puzzle game (FPS platforming is rarely a good idea as it is), and requiring a series of actions to be executed in a specific sequence with incredibly specific timing----it all just increasingly ruins the puzzles as each new chamber ratchets up the demands on the player in these areas. It wouldn't be so irritating if you didn't have to go fetch and reposition a bunch of blocks into catapults and conveyors and springs etc every time you failed one of the requirements (i.e. failed timing, or failed a jump, or else the physics just f***ed you over), but when you get into the later puzzle chambers, you're going to waste a lot of minutes of your life just "reloading" the puzzle chamber setup over and over again. As I said before, this all gets very f***ing tedious.

It's a shame, because this is a really well-made game and there is a lot here to like. I just really wish they wouldn't have pushed so hard on the physics/timing/platforming demands for a game that sells itself on puzzling. In my opinion, they took those aspects overboard and thereby undermined the enjoyment of the puzzling.

Quantum Conundrum is an interesting game. It was developed Kim Swift, who was the lead designer of Portal, and it shows. The game takes the interesting idea of switching between four dimensions to solve puzzles. The first dimension is the Fluffy dimension, which makes heavy objects like safes and couches so light that you can pick them up and throw them. The second dimension is the Heavy dimension, which makes cardboard boxes weigh like a ton of lead. The third dimension is the Slow dimension, which slows down everything but the player. The final dimension is the Reverse Gravity dimension, which reverses the gravity of all interactable objects. Throughout the game, the player switches between these four dimensions to travel from room to room. Some rooms only allow one dimension, while other may allow all four, so it does change it up every so often.

The story isn't much to look into. The protagonist, a young chap, goes to visit his uncle, Professor Fitz Quadrangle, in his mansion. When he arrives, the Professor gets sent to a pocket dimension because the project he was working on went ary; however, he is able to talk to the player as he travels through the mansion. The mansion, because of the Professor's failed expirament, is on lock-down, and the player needs to travel to three generators and turn them on. The ending is rather unsatisfying, so don't go to this game for the story.

The graphics looks nice and clean. There's not much detail within the rooms, much like Portal, but it is still pleasing to the eye. The one problem I have with the graphics is the default setting for bloom effects. Whenever in the Fluffy dimension, the bloom can be really bright and hurts the eyes. I had it turned off for the entire game, and there were still times when it was super bright.

The tracks that play in the background, while not abundant, are pretty good. They don't get stuck in your head, but it's still nice to listen to while racking your brain on a puzzle. The voice acting in this game is wonderful. The Professor is played by John de Lancie, the actor behind Q from Star Trek. His voice fits the role really well. The dialogue, for the most part, is entertaining and chuckle-worthy, though there are times when he gets annoying, mainly when he repeats dialogue after you failed an attempt.

While Quantum Conundrum isn't perfect, it does a fine job in delivering an interesting puzzle platformer. If you are a fan of Portal, I would recommed give this game a try.